‘Game of Thrones’ Season 7 Set Record Stuntmen On Fire (For Filming)

As any Game of Thrones breakdown will attest, VFX is often extensive enough that giant battles are little more than actors flailing around a small patch of grass. Not so for Season 7, which strove for such dragon realism as to break records for most stuntmen set on fire in a single go. They put them out, though. Eventually.

According to Entertainment Weekly, Game of Thrones Season 7 sought to get itself in Guinness with a scene featuring twenty stuntmen on fire, though those Book of World Records snobs apparently don’t record such feats. Said Emmy-winning stunt coordinator Rowley Irlam of the scene:

One sequence has 73 fire burns and that itself is a record. No film or TV show has ever done that in a whole show, let alone in one sequence. We also set 20 people on fire at one time, which is also a record. I think in Saving Private Ryan they had 13 on a beach, and on Braveheart they had 18 partial burns. Because of the nature of our attacking animals, we had the liberty to expand on that.

Irlam also grimly heralded the unique performance of each actor, so as the fire-minded among us can really feel like people are burning to death:

We try to think about what this would actually feel like to make it real for the viewers. We do different performances so hopefully you look through the fire and see a human being in the final throes of life. We try very hard to make it really feel like a casualty of war.